The Girl Dad Movie Canon

The best thing about One Battle After Another is how it doesn’t demand that you keep up—it simply expects it. Paul Thomas Anderson drops the audience directly into a world that looks and sounds a lot like ours, and yet in this world there’s a fairly competent revolution rising up against the recognizable bloom of facism, a xenophobic underground cabal that’s running and drinking tea out of Christmas Spode, and for the first quarter of the movie, a sexy sort of Bonnie-and-Clyde thing between—sorry, just checking my notes here—Teyana Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio. And we simply have to keep up.